Recovering the Role of the Ballot (Bob Overing)
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Premier Debate co-Director Bob Overing has recently released a copy of the paper he presented at the 2015 Alta Conference on Argumentation. He argues for a view similar to ethical modesty in LD framework debates but applied to the “role of the ballot” argument as used primarily in kritik and performance positions.
Feedback and discussion is much appreciated!
Bob Overing | Co-Director
Bob is a co-director of Premier, coach for Loyola in Los Angeles, and debater for the USC Trojan Debate Squad. As a senior in high school, he was ranked #1, earned 11 bids and took 2nd at TOC. In college, he cleared at CEDA and qualified to the NDT. His students have earned 60 career bids, reached TOC finals, and won many championships.
4 Comments
I’m not sure if the analogy to ethical modesty works for some of your examples. For example, given that the judge ought to adopt a policymaking ROB, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the judge has greater reason to vote for a plan that saves a million lives versus a plan that saves a thousand (much less 1000x as great a reason). This may depend on the justification of the ROB (maybe more consequential policies are more worth debating) but in any case comparisons of strength of link to ROBs have to be sensitive to the way we translate those impacts over into the level of what the judge ought to do.
Important conversation to have. I think a conversation that needs to also start occurring is the the strategic debate utility of a ROB.. Most debaters for one reason or another don’t just call out some folks Plans / ROBs / Advocacies when they are empty vessels…
Persuasive article on something that revolves around the question of what the ballot actually does (apart from designate a winner and loser in these debates). The issue I see with the role of the ballot (apart from it being a meaningless term teams name-drop to make their opponents impacts irrelevant) deals with presumption and the necessity to win offense or the question of how much offense needs to be won to outweigh the opponents impacts. Too often judges default to Team A won a ROB arg so any risk they win a link means they win the debate which makes ANY type of defense Team B could or would present useless.
It also might be useful to incorporate a discussion of alternative ways teams could approach the ROB question instead of reading the same recycled arguments over and over again (state is fascist v “portable skills”) such as approaches dealing with what debaters will take away from the round or how debate influences civic engagement in the world outside debate (which is the implied impact to ROB args that in my admittedly limited experience is rarely discussed)
Whatup Kristof. Thanks for the comment and thanks for housing me when I went to the conference last summer!
Yeah, so I definitely think there are a lot of people in the policy community who think that the ROB is just a cheap shot and not even worth talking about, but as you point out, there are a bunch of people who will view it as ‘any risk of a link.’
I also agree with the last point — someone should do a typology of ROB justifications or something like that to explain what’s supposed to be happening when debating ROBs.